On April 11-13, Temple MIS hosted the 10th Annual Association for Information Systems Student Chapter Leadership Conference. Over 180 students and faculty attendees from 33 schools participated in the conference. AIS student chapter leaders and members convened in Philadelphia to exchange best practices, network with students from other chapters and engage with industry experts on cutting-edge topics. Chapter members also competed in four competition tracks in topics such as analytics, AI and blockchain.

Temple was the founding University for AIS student chapters,” says Jeremy Shafer, Temple AIS student chapter adviser. “The first conference was held at Temple in 2010, and we were excited to bring it back to Temple for the 10th anniversary.”

The conference had a full agenda, with nine workshops and panels organized and led by students in topics such as chapter leadership, women in IT, location analytics and ethical hacking. Industry leaders from AmerisourceBergen, NBCUniversal, Alexion and Capgemini spoke to the student and faculty attendees about cutting-edge information technology topics. The conference also featured two keynotes: George Llado, chief information officer and senior vice president of Alexion, and Douglas Robinson, vice president of AmerisourceBergen.

“Bringing the conference back to Temple allowed us to show what we’ve accomplished as a chapter at a national level,” says Justin Kish, MIS ’19, Temple AIS chapter president. Temple AIS Officers Vice President Cara Evans, MIS ’19, and Director of Professional Development Ami Parekh, MIS ’19, coordinated a team of over 50 student volunteers, who greeted and guided attendees around campus.

The members of Temple AIS truly showed their dedication to the organization,” says Parekh, “The enthusiasm of our student volunteers made the conference a memorable experience for everyone.”

Matthew Nelson, executive director of AIS and Matti Rossi, past president of AIS, attended the conference. Nelson was impressed with the quality of the conference. “The quality of the competitions, the professionalism of the students and the enthusiasm and networking between students and universities is at the heart of AIS’ mission.”

“The 10th AIS Student Leadership conference demonstrated once again the liveliness of our student chapters and the health of the information systems field. AIS is very grateful for the support of Temple and the Fox School of Business and Department of Management Information Systems for organizing this year’s event,” says Rossi.

Bryce Buffaloe, MIS ’10, is a product manager with Google. “The job is like being the CEO of your own product,” says the Management Information Systems program graduate. And it’s hard to imagine a more exciting place for that kind of work than Google, whose past products have transformed the business world and our everyday lives.

Buffaloe recently added product manager to his responsibilities at Google, where he is also a Swarm engineer. Among other things, he works closely with current and potential clients to tackle their business problems with technology-based solutions. “Often they didn’t know the technology they needed, and I would be able to come back to them with tools that met their needs,” says Buffaloe. “A lot of business goals can be achieved using Google cloud.”

Before coming on board with Google in 2017, his career path took him to The United States Attorney’s office, where he worked on litigation support database management, and to Accenture, an information and technology services company in the San Francisco Bay area. “All my work has to do with data and application development. It’s just at Google, I have different tools to solve problems,” he says.

At first glance, the path from Temple to The U.S. Attorney’s office to Silicon Valley might not be obvious, but Buffaloe says the skills he honed at Temple work to unite his resume. He started studying to become a civil engineer before eventually transferring to the Fox School. There, Buffaloe connected with an academic advisor who helped him see that his interest was squarely at the intersection of computers and business–MIS.

By graduation, I was very well prepared for the real world. My teachers all brought the industry into the classroom,” he says.

One issue he’s working on now is a serious one with far-reaching implications: The opioid crisis. “It’s a complex problem, but it’s a problem that has a lot of data points. There are socio-economic areas, there are patterns to how people get help and how they get drugs,” says Buffaloe. There’s a large amount of anonymized data that, if it can be properly analyzed, can potentially make a major impact.

Google analyzes the datasets to, among other things, identify specific neighborhoods where there’s no local center or outreach for opioid users or at-risk populations. “It’s similar to the problem of food deserts. People may not be getting help because there’s nothing near them,” he says. But soon, thanks to projects like these, help could be on the way.

Clare Perretta, MS ’17, didn’t know what she wanted next in her career when she enrolled in the MS in Digital Innovation and Marketing program, but she had a hunch that the program would get her there. “I had been a writer and editor for years, but I was always drawn to marketing,” she recalls.

While she was a student, she worked full time as a communications specialist at NextGen Healthcare. Her colleagues in digital marketing turned her on to the magic of metrics, including Google Analytics. Making decisions based on data—not opinions—appealed to her, and she knew she needed more education to hone that expertise.

Professor Steven Sclarow’s Process Improvement class sparked a passion for project management. As part of that class, Perretta created a document that details every step a project goes through from idea to implementation at NextGen. After sharing it with a new NextGen vice president, the marketing department started using it as official reference material.

Another invaluable part of the program for Perretta was the network she joined. In fact, her social media instructor, Kimberly Jaindl, recently tapped Perretta to fill a new role of brand communications representative on her team at Lockheed Martin.

During the program, I learned what I want to be doing—more strategy and operations-level work—and now that’s exactly what I’m doing,” she says.

In his career before enrolling in the program, Anthony M. Pizzuto, MS ’18, had done a little bit of everything in the world of online marketing. “I worked with production teams, I’ve led creative teams, I’ve done coding and merchandising,” he says.

Pizzuto has served as the head of digital experience for Victoria’s Secret PINK brand, where he led the development of their app and oversaw user engagement. He’s also worked as the director of marketing for Prudential Financial.

What he learned in the program goes deeper than digital. “I learned to understand who the customer really is,” he says.

Since earning his degree, he has taken on a new role as head of brand marketing for Days Inn, owned by Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. Now he applies the principles of user experience he learned at Temple on a larger scale, overseeing a global marketing strategy that is both online and offline, including legacy formats like billboards and radio.

“I understand now that guiding a customer through a journey is the same whether it’s in the physical world or the virtual world. And that divide is getting smaller every day,” he says.

“Technology changes every three months, but the principles I learned at Temple can always be extrapolated to the bigger picture.”

Professor Detmar Straub had eight articles published or accepted for publication over the 2018-2019 academic year. These papers cover a wide range of topics, including health IT, knowledge management, outsourcing and two-sided platforms. This research will appear in the top journals in the discipline, such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, the Journal of Management Information Systems and the Journal of the Association of Information Systems.

According to an annual analysis produced by the University of Arizona, Straub has a cumulative h-index of 70, designating him as one of the most productive and most cited researchers in the field of MIS. The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar.

A partial list of Straub’s recently published and forthcoming work is below:

Straub, D., Chen, L., & Baird, A (in press). An Analysis of the Evolving Intellectual Structure of Health Information Systems Research within the Information Systems (IS) Discipline. Journal of the Association of Information Systems.

“Established in 1988 by the Board of Trustees, the Temple University Great Teacher Awards recognize faculty members annually for their continuous excellence in teaching. Each award carries a stipend and each awardee receives a commemorative sculpture and framed certificate. In addition, each recipient’s name is engraved on the Great Teachers Wall in the Founder’s Garden. ”

Min-Seok Pang doesn’t follow sports. “I’m a news junkie, and politics is like my sport,” said the associate professor of Management Information Systems. So back in 2013, when late-night TV hosts were mocking the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov, the website integral to the Affordable Care Act, Pang stayed on top of every headline.

Pang has an explanation for the paper’s warm reception: “In the business school, our focus is usually on just that: business. We don’t really look at government,” he said. But with technology becoming increasingly vital to implementing new policies, it was time to expand the boundaries of his discipline.

In his research, he analyzed 14 years of data on IT investment at the federal level. His conclusions could change the way money is spent on technology: When the government is divided, with one party in the White House while the other controls Congress, 8.3% less money is invested in new IT systems, with more spent maintaining legacy systems.

This reluctance to innovate can be countered by increased funding for new IT development when conditions are favorable. A unified government is one such condition; if an agency head has been approved by Congress that also tilts IT budgets toward new initiatives. Pang also advocates for the creation of a cabinet-level Chief Information Officer (CIO), who would have authority to direct funding toward IT development.

In the two years of unified government since Pang’s research ended, the Modernization of Government Technology (MGT) Act passed. The Act provides significant funding for investments in new technology and updating obsolete systems. “This is a drop in the bucket of what’s needed, but it’s a good start,” said Pang.

Pang’s next research project will explore how government can attract younger IT talent away from Silicon Valley. If his recommendation for a cabinet-level CIO is realized, this next generation of developers will be essential to avoid the blunders of the now-infamous Healthcare.gov rollout and implement the policy initiatives of the future.

The Department of Management Information Systems continues to grow. I am pleased to introduce you to our two newest faculty, Anthony Vance and Aleksi Aaltonen. Dr. Vance’s expertise is in behavioral aspects of cybersecurity, and Dr. Aaltonen’s research focuses on digital innovation. We are excited to have them join our department.

Read about how we prepare our students for future success. Read about Bruce Fadem, Chair of the Fox IT Advisory Board. He discusses his role as founding Chair of the board and how that group of senior IT executives shapes our cutting-edge curriculum and provides guidance for our students.

These opportunities are a big part of what make our students successful. We profile Christian Hettinger (BBA ’18) and Danielle Buerger (BBA ’17), who are applying what they’ve learned in MIS in two very different career paths. We also profile Shahla Raei (’17), graduate of the MS in IT Auditing and Cybersecurity, who is applying what she learned to advance her career as an IT Auditor.

Associate Professor Anthony Vance said the most common cybersecurity mistake people make is password reuse. To minimize the threat of a data breach, every online account password must be unique. All that memorization? Impossible.

“If you try to remember all the passwords in your head, they’ll be weak. You shouldn’t even try,” said Vance, who has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), eye tracking and electroencephalogram to explore how to create security warnings that won’t be overlooked. “I recommend using a password manager.”

These online services require users to memorize a single strong password – Vance recommends a random string of words – and the software will manage the rest.

“That reduces the number of passwords from dozens to just one, and that’s feasible,” he said.

Vance is one of two new professors on the faculty of the Management Information Systems Department of Temple University’s Fox School of Business. He will teach a cybersecurity elective for undergraduates while juggling research topics including how to make strong passwords easier for the brain to remember. He also serves as Director of Fox’s Center for Cybersecurity.

“At the beginning of classes, I tell students I want them to develop a sense of ‘professional paranoia,’ ” said Vance, who has Ph.Ds in Information Systems from Georgia State University, the University of Paris-Dauphine and Finland’s University of Oulu. “I want people to know what risks are out there and to make intelligent decisions about them.”

Assistant Professor Aleksi Aaltonen, whose research focuses on data-based innovations and organizing using computational methods, is also new to Fox. He’s also a successful entrepreneur – He co-founded Moves, an activity tracking app that was purchased by Facebook in 2014.

“I tell students that doing academic research and being a start-up entrepreneur are very similar because with both you have to cope with lots of uncertainty,” Aaltonen said. “Even if you have a great idea, it takes a lot of work to be successful whether you’re an entrepreneur or a researcher. Both also require accepting that sometimes you’ll fail.”

Aaltonen, whose Ph.D. is from the London School of Economics and Political Science, said technology is changing quickly and it’s critical that users evolve and change with it. He cited Wikipedia as an example.

“How did it learn to manage itself? Where did that come from?” he asked. “We have to remember that it’s completely different from 2001 when it started. The original intentions may not drive it today. How do they change and evolve without becoming stale and falling apart?”

Aaltonen will teach a project-based MIS 4596 course requiring students to develop a tech solution to a problem or an innovative application. It’s the final course for MIS undergraduates, allowing them to integrate all that they’ve learned.

Aaltonen’s real world entrepreneurship means students will benefit from his experiences. He also discourages being a new technology evangelist.

“We need to teach our students to see through the hype and to pick out the technologies that are relevant for their businesses,” Aaltonen said. “Pay attention to tech but not just for the sake of tech.”

During his years overseeing information technology organizations for several large corporations, Bruce Fadem was always surprised that many new employees, even those with newly awarded degrees, were not well prepared for real-world challenges.

“Their knowledge was three to five years behind the times,” Fadem said. Temple’s Department of Management Information Systems is an exception, in part thanks to Fadem and his fellow members of the Fox IT Advisory Board. One of the board’s primary goals since coming together in 2006: helping MIS keep its curriculum contemporary.

“We’ve found a way to change the curriculum on a fairly frequent basis, which is not the norm for large universities, said Fadem, the IT Advisory Board Chairman. “Tech changes quickly and it’s become a critical component of everything we do. … It’s important that students are exposed to and understand it and know how to deal with the new technology and how it can be applied to business processes and products to help companies achieve their goals.”

Fadem, who retired as Wyeth CIO after a 20-year career, reluctantly agreed to found the advisory board, which is today composed of senior IT executives from well-known firms such as AmerisourceBergen, QVC, Pfizer, and NBCUniversal. Fadem explained he’d served on similar councils at other universities—where they used the boards to rubber stamp projects they’d already launched.

Fox’s IT Advisory Board worked differently from the start. Besides keeping curriculum current, board members and their firms engage in symposiums, student competitions, career fairs; provide insights on projects; conduct guest lectures and mentor students, as well fund scholarships and other activities.

“When I talk to students, I try to get them to understand that your career isn’t a series of well-defined steps. It’s shaped by circumstances and opportunities and you have to take advantage of them and adapt,” Fadem said. “I feel so fortunate in my professional career. I got dropped into MIS at Temple when it was still a relatively unknown unit, fast forward to today, I ended up being surrounded by very, very good people – board members, MIS faculty and staff, and students – who carried the organization and me on their shoulders to becoming one of the top MIS programs in the nation.”